Re: Unicode string literals versus the world

On Saturday 11 April 2009 00:54:25 Tom Lane wrote:
> It gets worse though: I have seldom seen such a badly designed piece of
> syntax as the Unicode string syntax --- see
> http://developer.postgresql.org/pgdocs/postgres/sql-syntax-lexical.html#SQL
>-SYNTAX-STRINGS-UESCAPE
>
> You scan the string, and then after that they tell you what the escape
> character is!? Not to mention the obvious ambiguity with & as an
> operator.
>
> If we let this go into 8.4, our previous rounds with security holes
> caused by careless string parsing will look like a day at the beach.
> No frontend that isn't fully cognizant of the Unicode string syntax is
> going to parse such things correctly --- it's going to be trivial for
> a bad guy to confuse a quoting mechanism as to what's an escape and what
> isn't.

Note that the escape character marks the Unicode escapes; it doesn't affect the
quote characters that delimit the string. So offhand I can't see any potential
for quote confusion/SQL injection type problems. Please elaborate if you see
a problem.

If there are problems, we could consider getting rid of the UESCAPE clause.
Without it, the U&'' strings would behave much like the E'' strings. But I'd
like to understand the problem first.